Okay, so hde1 is my chosen boot partition, it's formatted with ext3, mounts okay (outside EVMS; root partition is under EVMS, but that should be no problem; I've got evms working on a different system just fine).

But alas, it is not to be. Booting gets me as far as stage 1.5, then it's "Grub loading, please wait..." and immediately "Error 2"

Now, there are no symlinks that I can see in hde1. Hde1 is indeed ext2fs (grub even agrees!). And yet... error 2.

I'm totally mystified. The only thing I can think of is that somehow the mapping isn't working. I mean, after booting the liveCD, grub clearly sees stage1 on (hd0,0), and there are only two hard drives in the system (hde, hdg), and hdg doesn't have an appropriate partition that would have stage1. So I'm lost.

It should be noted that the two drives are on a promise fasttrak (I think) raid controller which thinks they may be raided--but I've used the system for years under linux (with a different boot drive) and it's always treated them as two separate drives.

Answered my own question (as often happens). Yep, it was the Fasttrak card. I pulled it out and connected the drives directly to the motherboard and it booted right out of the gate.

Sigh...

I'm not sure, but I think the solution to this issue is to remove the stage1_5 files and install GRUB in the MBR again. IIRC, cyrillic and NeddySeagoon have talked about that earlier in this collection of GRUB threads - sorry, but I have no specific link._________________Jorge.

If the fasttrack has put the drives into a fakeraid set, then grub should honor that providing you do a fakeraid install.
It falls in a heap when you use the underlying drives seperately (as you have) and leave the fakeraid on.
Grub installs on a single drive, which is OK and why it boots from the motherboard but at boot time, raid 'chunks' are read from alternate drives ... that breaks at the end of the first 'chunk'.

If you turn off the fasttrack raid, it will JustWork_________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Hello, perhaps someone can point me in the right direction... I'm having the error 17 problem. My boot partition is /dev/hda1, and I've tried installing grub both manually and using the grub-install command. I booted the system to a grub floppy image, and tried to mount this partition using the command root (hd0,0) in the grub shell. However, it just says that it is an unrecognized file system type. This file system is formatted ext2, and mounts fine in the livecd environment. I've tried but can't seem to boot from this prompt as well. Any ideas? I've been messing with this for a while, and have tried searching this thread and the forums as well as Google, and have not had much luck. Thanks for any input, and sorry if I missed something...

I have installed grub to my usb stick, but when I boot it (BIOS says it is a RMD-FDD), the only thing displayed is "GRUB" in the topleft corner.
I then tried to boot the stick on my notebook, and the grub menu appeared, so the grub installation should be fine.
Any idea how I can debug this? BIOS is the newest version, the board is quite old, MSI KT400, could that be the reason?

Your first computer is expecting a USB device to fake a bootable area like a floppy, which was the original way bootable CDs were made.
It looks like it does not support newer formats.

Further, some USB devices look like real hard drives, with a partition table, others look like big floppies. I have both sorts.
To make matters worse, I have also seen one that appears to be both at the same time.

I suspect its a BIOS issue._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Your first computer is expecting a USB device to fake a bootable area like a floppy, which was the original way bootable CDs were made.
It looks like it does not support newer formats.

Further, some USB devices look like real hard drives, with a partition table, others look like big floppies. I have both sorts.
To make matters worse, I have also seen one that appears to be both at the same time.

I suspect its a BIOS issue.

Hi NeddySeagoon,

thanks for the reply. I also tried booting freedos from the stick, which worked fine. Does freedos use a different format?

Well, I had the 0x7 problem with GRUB, I have Linux and Windows in a same Hard Drive and I couln't acces to Windows any more but I could acces to Linux.

My solution:

I used a Windows Xp.
- boot from the cd.
- I used the recovery system with the "R" option and then I only use the command FIXBOOT (not FIXMBR) in the command promt.
- Restared the system, ran Linux from GRUB, restared again and ran Windows from GRUB and then I could boot Windows again.

I think that this is a wired posible solution but it realy worked for me.

And if you want to remove grub you can run FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the rescue command line promt and restart the system.